slonik

Name

slonik -- Slony-I command processor

Synopsis

slonik [options] [filename]

Options

-w

Suppress slonik's behaviour of automatically waiting
for event confirmations before submitting events to
a different node. If this option is specified, your
slonik script may require explicit SLONIK WAIT FOR EVENT commands in order to behave
properly, as was the behaviour of slonik prior to
version 2.1.

Description

slonik is the command processor
application that is used to set up and modify configurations of
Slony-I replication clusters.

Outline

The slonik command line utility is
supposed to be used embedded into shell scripts; it reads commands
from files or stdin.

It reads a set of Slonik statements, which are written in a
scripting language with syntax similar to that of SQL, and performs
the set of configuration changes on the slony nodes specified in the
script.

Nearly all of the real configuration work is actually done by
calling stored procedures after loading the
Slony-I support base into a database.
Slonik was created because these stored
procedures have special requirements as to on which particular node
in the replication system they are called. The absence of named
parameters for stored procedures makes it rather hard to do this
from the psql prompt, and
psql lacks the ability to maintain
multiple connections with open transactions to multiple
databases.

The format of the Slonik "language" is very
similar to that of SQL, and the parser is based on a similar set of
formatting rules for such things as numbers and strings. Note that
slonik is declarative, using literal values throughout. It is
anticipated that Slonik scripts will typically be
generated by scripts, such as Bash or Perl, and
these sorts of scripting languages already have perfectly good ways
of managing variables, doing iteration, and such.